Back in the days when all serious skaters did both figures and freestyle, everyone had two pairs of skates, one for figures (called "patch skates") and one for freestyle. But having two pairs wasn't a requirement to begin skating. Everyone started out with only one pair. A second pair wasn't considered necessary until second test… Continue reading Combination grind
Category: Metal skates
IJlst, city of skate-makers
IJlst, stad van schaatsenmakers by Edsko Hekman. IJlst: Visser, 2002. Today's book report is on IJlst, stad van schaatsenmakers by Edsko Hekman. IJlst is a a city in Friesland where lots of skates were made in the nineteenth century. This short book (only 64 pages long) is about the 24 IJlst skate-makers. Several of these… Continue reading IJlst, city of skate-makers
Why cross-grinding is (not always) bad
Cross-grinding refers to sharpening skates with a grinding stone whose axis of rotation is parallel to the skate blade. This means that if you hold the skate sideways (blade parallel to the floor), the grinding wheel rotates down. This is how the ordinary bench grinders from the hardware store are set up. A bench grinder.… Continue reading Why cross-grinding is (not always) bad
Robert Jones’s skates again
My Robert Jones skates. In A Treatise on Skating—the first book on skating, published exactly 250 years ago—Robert Jones describes, in great detail, his ideal skates. I made a pair and tried them out. Jones's skates are the type used in England at his time, in contrast to the Dutch type. They have short, curved… Continue reading Robert Jones’s skates again
My new snavelschaatsen
Yesterday I put the finishing touches on my snavelschaatsen. I started them back around the end of February or the beginning of March, so it took me about 9 months to make them, start to finish. My finished snavelschaatsen. These skates are based on a couple of Hieronymus Bosch paintings and some archaeological finds. The… Continue reading My new snavelschaatsen
Fluted skates
Early skating authors had a lot of bad things to say about deep hollows on ice skates. I have said nothing of those skates whose surfaces are grooved, and are commonly called fluted skates, because I think their construction is so bad, that they are not fit to be used; in fact, they are so… Continue reading Fluted skates
Robert Jones’s skates
In his 1772 Treatise on Skating, Robert Jones describes what he considers the ideal skate in detail, including measurements: Figure 1 (top) represents a skate, made after the English fashion, with some improvements; the proportions are as follows: Let the distance from the point of the fender, A, to the toe hook, which is shewn… Continue reading Robert Jones’s skates
Did snow skates work?
As far as I can tell, the answer is no. The snow skates I'm thinking of have metal blades an inch wide or a bit more. They're about as long as the skater's foot and tie on to the shoes. A good example is the one I found in an antique shop. In that post,… Continue reading Did snow skates work?
Skate sharpening in 1852
In 1852, George Anderson, a member of the Glasgow Skating Club, published the following advice on skate sharpening under the pseudonym Cyclos: The edges should ... be kept sharp by occasional grinding, perhaps once in a season, or even less; and in doing it, the iron should be held across the face of the grindstone,… Continue reading Skate sharpening in 1852
Blade gauges
The radius of hollow is very important to skaters because it determines how the blades feel on the ice. It's set during sharpening. When you get your skates sharpened, you can request a particular radius of hollow. What if you don't know what hollow your blades have? Or if you want to check that the… Continue reading Blade gauges